Betting on Braincake: Interview with Jen Stancil

Last week, Elaine Gurian and I talked about radical change in museums. She said it can happen in one of two ways—either the organization is small enough that no one will notice, or has a director with such strong vision they can charm and fund the pants off of a new idea. Jennifer Stancil, director of the Girls Math and Science Partnership (GMSP), has both. Former museum start-up queen, Jen is taking a small organization whose goal is to promote girls’ involvement in math and science through research and programming to new, innovative, exciting places.

Gender equity work in math and science isn’t exactly woo-worthy. What’s so special about the GMSP? If you search the web for the organization, you won’t get to some academic-looking page in soft blues and statistics. You’ll land on Braincake, their social networking site for girls, parents, and teachers focused on math and science education. Braincake isn’t some fakey attempt to pander to teens. It’s got style, a strong brand, and growing content. It reflects the GMSP’s—and Jen’s—commitment to creating a set of programs by and for its audience: teen girls.

Jen and I sat down to talk about building for teens, working the web, and the role of innovation in museums.

When I left DC, I was packing my stuff and found your Braincake materials. I continue to be impressed by how novel, attractive, and audience-specific Braincake appears.

For me, the look of Braincake, the over-arching brand, is so strong. It was done with about $250,000 of market research about what girls knew, liked about science, how they wanted to be approached about science. MARCUSA did the research and the Heinz endowment and the Alcoa foundation paid for it.

It was not a tough sell. Those are two of our founding partners. And at that time they were doing a public awareness campaign. We know that girls do not engage in science, math, technology, engineering outside of school at all. What do kids do after school? They play sports. The computer games they play and the tv they watch—it’s not focused on science. They’re not watching the Discovery channel 24/7. I knew that coming to the organization and I had this look and the website to work with. Coming in to research that says that—where do you go from there? How dov you reach today’s girl? Because today’s girl was not even the girl they were talking to. Regardless of how much marketing you do, there was a lot of adult configurations in the branding.

With Braincake, the look and the entrance to the website is successful, but what about the guts? The main part about redoing the interior of the “house” (launched Feb this year), is how do you age this appropriately to a 13 or 14 year old? We’d vet designs past kids. And you’d see the morph at 12, 13, 14—the gaps from age to age. When you’re reading Seventeen Magazine, you’re really about 13 years old. So how do you design for that kind of maturity, and for kids who want a MySpace? But we’re a non-profit. We didn’t want to build MySpace. One of the vendors made a proposal to us with the phrase: “It’s MySpace meets NASA." I like that; here’s an educational site that also has social networking at its core. So to get the design and language geared to them is very difficult because most of the stuff for them is ads and magazines.

For lots of people, it's overwhelming to jump in and embrace social networking as a basis for an educational tool. What was your personal journey to get there?

The easy answer is: I’ve got an audience and I need to understand it. But my background is in museum startups. The thing that struck me, building Exploris, I started going into Lowe’s and Home Depot, and darn it if they aren’t doing educational programs! They’re stealing my thing! Museums aren’t competing with other museums; they’re competing with corporate America. You can go to Michael’s and learn to sew, knit, do crafts. Museums don’t have the lock on hands-on informal education experiences.

Museums have a dual challenge now. When I was at Exploris, we had the AAM president come and talk about research done on how people perceive experts, and [he said] museum people are in the top three for respected authorities in fields. We field questions for science fairs and research. We bear a lot of responsibility as museums as experts. But at the same time as I feel the pressure to be an expert, I’m starting to feel pressure to keep my programs edgy—to move the way our culture is moving and the way that corporations—stores—have decided that education is a major part of how they work. So I started thinking in a business sense. That’s what it boils down to.

You're talking about changing the unique value proposition that museums have for modern society.

Exactly. I’m into the whole hedgehog proposition. Where do you hit that centerpiece? What are you best in the world at? We’ve got to be unique, and we’ve got to be great for girls in science. So we’ve got to be figuring out how their concept of changing the world can connect to math and science.

It wasn’t deliberate like we need to start reading Seventeen. We listen to our girls. We have girls saying, have you heard of this? Do you look at this? It turns out there are certain design qualities that girls really like—a cluttery look—like J. K. Rowling’s website. We have a teen team—14 advisors of diverse age and background and race—and they are so funny. One of them said, I hope you never advertise in XX… that’s really beneath you. She understood the cleanness of the brand. Which is very sophisticated for her age. And yes, the design is cutesy, but it’s also very serious and attracts very intelligent girls.

So when it comes to Web 2.0, it's what they want. For example, podcasts. We selected girls and they go out on the road and we get them with great mentors. And we’re going to equip them with recording software, and they’re going to sit in a $200,000 radio studio to edit it. With counsel. We put them with CIA agents. With robotic engineers. These girls got so much out of the experience about women—about why careers in science are for them.

With Girltalk, doing these podcasts, we want this to be girl-led, we them to be at the center of the project. We based the grant on inquiry, and that’s why we got it from PBS.

The way the Web 2.0 stuff happened with Braincake has been very much about what kind of girl we think today’s girl is. We don’t think science is nerdy. Girls have so many options, and some of them don’t see limitations, and we here girls saying in 5th grade, “oh my friends will fail test deliberately to get boys’ attention.” The psychology of girls in the 5th, 6th, 7th grade is so incredibly complex. We just want to hear from them, to make a place for them. Girls are self-perpetuating, self-driven. So once we get them into something, it will become sustaining. So you have to be thoughtful about your hooks. How do you simulate community on a website? There are ways you can upload your own pictures in your personal viewing of the Braincake page. There are hidden cookies. These things are built this way because girls are built this way.

How is going, audience- and use-wise?

I’m looking at our stats. Prior to changing the site in February, we had about 2100 discrete visits per month. Post-February, we’re up to almost 8000 per month. Web traffic has quadrupled. We had one million hits in 2006, and we have about 5000 registered users—1000 who joined since the overhaul this year. Some people are voyeuristic, some are active. Having the girl blogs and the parent blogs coming out in Feb, it’s a small way to start a community—but when a girl asks a question instead of an adult, it’s more fascinating.

It was difficult to figure out how we maintain security while using 3rd party tools. Everything is vetted before it goes up. It’s a moderated chat. The reason we chose typepad [wordpress] is because we could be notified immediately when we get a comment in, we can monitor in live time.

The content starts with the teen team. Regardless of having this internet portal that was built to be a database and the first thing that people know about the partnership—and that is the way you first find it (GMSP)—we keep many of our programs small and intimate as they build so we can spend time with them one-on-one. The girls on our team are all articulate and engaged and I want them to feel the confidence to do something they might not otherwise have the chance to do. We tell them: here’s a global forum for you. Everyone’s aware when a new girlblog comes out and they support each other. I get forwards daily from teens. That’s what they do—find cool stuff on the internet and send it around. We know we have to build our website partially on word of mouth—it has to come from that legitimately.

Have you gotten any negative feedback about it being too superficial or hyped for a research program?

No. I don’t think it’s a lot of hype. The feedback I get is—what an innovative and unique brand. I think it’s seen as intelligent. We were academically incubated for so long. But even then we were putting out pilots of things. And now, programs are 80% of what we do.

What advice would you give to someone who sees this and wants to do something like it at their own institution?

First of all, [if the interest is in gender and math/science] I’d want people to consider being affiliates. Using this brand to put wrapping paper on their own girl programs and expanding and disseminating our programs.

There’s a lot of money out there to be had around gender—but there’s more money to be had around corporations who are desperate to recruit a new workforce. It’s all workforce development. There’s no trick to it. And all you have to turn to the math media. It was not even a month ago that in Newsweek they did a report on No Child Left Behind and they said that in K-6—the museum market—we are teaching 17 min less math per week and 23 min less of science per week than previously. That’s one period a week we are shortchanging our kids that in math and science. And they’re already behind globally. So who is going to rise to the challenge to get kids engaged in this and sustain their long term interest in these highly lucrative careers? We’re not equipping teachers and kids, we’re not teaching it in a way that’s appealing to them. And we’re not competitive.

And if you think what we're doing is radical and you want to do it, well, we’ve already done it, so figure out how you can connect and build.

It seems like one of the keys is that you are running Braincake more like a tech company than a museum, that you are really able to embrace innovation.

This is about whether you’re nimble or not. My goal is to lead a nimble organization. Not wayward—but we’re able to adapt quickly and that’s built into us. And museum people want to be that way. We have a museum community that’s intelligent and capable and the desire and passion to educate people is there. But the organization around them doesn’t support it.

It's been amazing, working with the language of innovation. If I want to do something like podcasting, it happens. Podcasting for the Science Center? Much slower process. Much more difficult. I just take it for granted that this is the way that I run the business. I think that’s what we need—a whole bunch of people that take it for granted that they run their shop as a nimble, edgy, progressive shop. That’s what they say about museums in the 60s and 70s, right? That’s what they were built on, people taking risks and responsibility and just doing it. I think we need more of that.

What’s So Funny? Humor in Museums

I’m working on a virtual museum project these days, and one question that often comes up is “What is the most fun thing we could let visitors do here that they can’t do in the real world?” Inevitably, the answer involves irreverence, whether in the form of interpretation (the comedian’s tour of the museum), instruction (how to guides for not looking stupid while talking about art), or downright destruction (smashing valuable objects). Every time one of these ideas comes up, a guilty silence spreads around the team. Can we really do this? Will the establishment support it? What risks do we run by casting our nets for humor?

After all, most of our ideas don’t require a virtual landscape; any museum could commission Kid Rock’s tour of the galleries. What they do require is a willingness to explore using humor in the museum.

There are plenty of good reasons that most museums are laugh-impaired. Some are cast as temples for objects to be revered. Others explore subject matter that is patently unfunny. Others believe any nod to becoming an “entertainment venue” is a topic for concern (though many are headed that way). But the biggest reason I think museums avoid humor is humor undermines authority. To make a joke about something, you have to feel comfortable playing with the item, with visitors, and with your own role as an “expert.” You have to be okay with the idea that someone might laugh at you.

So why do it? Because humor is a design tool that can be employed as powerfully as a skillfully placed light or a fabulous slice of audio. It can break up and lighten an oppressively intense experience. It can provide connection points among strangers. And educationally, it can be an open hand inviting novice museum-goers to have a comfortable and enjoyable museum experience.

Let’s start by talking about design. As more museums move towards narrative presentation of content, the bank of useful design tools grows to include those used by other storytellers. Consider television. I was watching an episode of CSI recently with audio commentary from the director and many times, he pointed out humorous touches designed to “lighten” the tone of the show. Amidst dead bodies and gore and weapons and test tubes, they’re telling jokes. Lots of them. The sarcastic puns, the gallows humor—it’s all over the show.

Sure, it’s entertainment. But it’s also about murder. The topic is not exactly levity-central, and yet they still find opportunities to crack jokes and try to make the audience smile. The show’s creators, like most entertainers, want to create a positive experience for their audience. And humor is a big part of that. As more museums seek to diversify beyond the intellectual experience of objects and ideas, humor should sit alongside emotion, spirituality, expression, and other newfound palettes for experience design.

But what about the fact that humor often feels silly, like a grab for something profane? Real humor isn’t about knock knock jokes (unless you’re eight). It’s an emotional release valve. Does humor lessen the impact of an intense experience? No. Humor provides comfort, whether in the face of death or potential disaster. It humanizes the experience of stress. It also can encourage people to keeping going or try again.

Consider its use in games. Game researchers have shown that humor contributes to players’ investment in the game, comfort with failure, and general enjoyment. When you see your last ten minutes of agonizing moves go up in smoke, the cosmic funniness of seeing lemmings jump off the cliff or your character get swallowed by a giant toad softens the blow.

It’s also a decent (though debatable) educational tool. Museum professionals know to lead with a joke when they speak at conferences; why not do the same in exhibitions? Punctuating serious presentations with humor keeps people engaged. One of the strangest ways I see this employed is in the ride safety videos at theme parks. These videos, about how to survive a roller coaster, used to be dull and practically unwatchable. Now, they’re full of slapstick—crash test dummies breaking the ride, crazy things you shouldn’t do—and by extension, fun to watch. The theme parks found a way to turn an onerous requirement into a useful piece of entertainment, and I imagine more people are aware of the safety restrictions now than previously.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, humor can be used as a way to connect with visitors who are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or wary of the museum experience. For that large part of the population, museums are foreign landscapes. The visitors don’t know how they should act or what to expect. Making a joke out of these overwhelming first experiences, whether by modeling silly behavior as in the theme park example or making fun of traditional models of museum-going, releases the pressure valve on uncertainty.

But it’s not as easy as throwing a couple puns on the wall. The biggest challenge inherent in the use of humor is its power to alienate. A lot of humor is about us laughing at them—and the identity of us and them are different in different situations. In museums, it’s important to be clear about who these groups are. Probably the safest way to use humor is to make jokes about ourselves, about the museum, and let them laugh at us. What jokes are you willing to tell?

So a priest, a rabbi, and a duck walk into a museum…

What Now? (pt. 2)

I wrote yesterday's post on the eve of the 2020 American Election. The whole country felt coiled up, tight with anticipation. I'm not sure anticipation is really the exact word. I feel as if there might be a German word that summarized the national emotional state on November 3. It would mean a combination of fear, anticipation, exhaustion, and horror. In fact, I suspect this emotional state is the only thing that brought Americans together on that day. 

I decided to post yesterday's piece, in relation to this one. Yesterday's post was an introspective one, long on ideas and short actionable advice.  Today, let's try to focus on actions. We've had helplessness foisted on us this year, with the pandemic. The lack of agency against coronavirus is frustrating. You're susceptible to so many other people's choices, and you have no idea if you're making the right choice when you get to make one. It's exhausting. 

To add to this, we find ourselves splintering like so much broken glass. We're red/ blue; mask/ no mask; science/ no science. We're this or that. Either/or. 

Museums are seeing such deep divides as well; the old order and the new one. The divisiveness is not conducive to moving forward. Imagine walking while doing the splits. But, how are we going  to be able to move forward? Well, the first is to have some really uncomfortable conversations. 

In fact, that's why I decided to post yesterday's comments. That probably felt a little hard for some people. You might say, but I know I'm white but I'm doing my best. I'd answer, I bet you are. It's just really hard, and it's going to get harder. We're not going back to the before. There is only going forward. So how are we going forward? Assessing our problems is a good place to start. Well, first, I think we'll need to assess what was wrong with the past. 

Here are some problems I see: 

• Academia is our boogie man. We'd defer to the fear of not seeming academic whenever someone proposed shocking changes, like bullet points in labels. I truly believe learning and scholarship are the engines of museums. Curators, I assure you that your colleagues are not reading the labels to judge your intelligence. They're not reading your labels; my mom is. And, my mom just wants to know what she's looking at. (And, frankly, we should be thrilled someone is reading our labels, because that isn't even a given...) So, we spend all this time fearing we're "dumbing it down," when we don't really interrogate why we even think explaining and bringing everyone to the same level might be really smart for our field. 
• We made small things really big--fearing even the smallest changes. Whenever I see something interesting in a museum, like a family guide done well or an interesting sign, I assume there were 100 meetings and at least one moment of an emotional outburst. This is because in museums we make the stakes very high for small things. Think about signage. Ever wanted to try a funny or off the wall sign at your museum? For most museums, that is really controversial work. But, those kinds of things only matter in the museum field. If or if you don't put up a sign, is completely inconsequential outside the field. And, in the end, it meant we didn't deal with the biggest problem; were we actually serving as much of society as we should. 
• There is no right answer, but we often act like there is one. The hierarchical structure of museums often means highly credentialed people have more say. Those people often make decisions based on their training. As such, a certain "right" decision is seen as a given. For example, what is "allowed" to be hung in your main exhibit hall? Why is that what's allowed? Who decided? All those answers might be true, but there is probably a whole host of other right answers you're not thinking of. 
• We built our present, though by bad building decisions. Many of the financial woes of our field are due to the large operating incomes we have due to building projects. Those building projects were well and good when we had the rental income to buoy us up. When that went, we found ourselves as a field financially sinking. 
• Diversity. Oh, Diversity. You might refer to yesterday's post on this one. Underlying that post, you should have noticed a woman of color who is tired. For so long, this field has made people of color do their diversity work. It's exhausting. 
• For the love of it is killing us. Most museum professionals need a graduate degree for their job that will make them so little money that they'll not be able to pay off that degree. They do it because they love the knowledge and the field. We're like buskers who went to Julliard, well-educated and performing for pennies. 

What are some of the problems you see? 

Now here is the important part. Let's get all these problems out there, and then let's start thinking about how to actually fix them. 

Just Looking? Lurkers, Judges, and Contributors

Today, personal ads from three kinds of museum users....
This weekend, I was working on this article about encouraging civic discourse in museums through 2.0 and looked up dizzily to realize I’ve been having too much of a collective action lovefest. As a designer, I believe that museums should strive to offer diverse networked, social experiences. But as a museum-goer, what about the times I don’t WANT to have a networked, social experience? What if I just want to look at the art and be left alone? One of the key aspects of web 2.0 experiences (which I was overlooking) is their flexibility in offering multiple ways to engage with the experience and the content.

Most 2.0 sites allow for many shades of “lurking” and “participating.” Consider YouTube. The large majority of YouTube users are lurkers—they watch videos, but do not submit them. The next group of people are users who rate, tag, and comment on videos, but do not submit videos. These people might be thought of as “judges,” or, at best, curators. They are adding metadata to videos about their value and content, which may be for their own use (for future navigation) or for collective use (to add to the larger conversation about what’s good and what isn’t). The smallest set are the “contributors” who actually upload videos they have made.

Many 2.0 sites that revolve around content, like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr, behave this way. There are other sites, like Delicious and MySpace, that center around a more core personal experience (your tags, your site), and so require a minimum level of individual “contributing” to start getting value from the site.

How does this relate to the experience design in museums? Most museums offer lots of lurking, some contributing, and almost no judging/curating—and most experiences are in one of those buckets without dipping into the others as well. I can make a video, but I can’t rate them. I can touch the Van de Graff generator and have funny hair, and I can watch other people touch it, but I can’t vote on videos of the FUNNIEST Van de Graff hair experiences. I can leave a comment, and read today’s comments, but I can’t flip through the archive of comments going back X years.

There are many awesome museum interactives that are for single users that have an unintended lurker benefit (funny hair from the Van de Graff being just one example). On sites like Flickr, the role of the contributor as performer for an audience is explicit—and a source of motivation to continue contributing. Not every museum visitor wants to be a performer, but when the interactive elicits a funny or exciting or fabulous result that will be watched and enjoyed by surrounding visitors anyway, that “performance” could be captured and enjoyed in other ways, in the museum, on the museum website (live Van de Graff cam?), or on other sites like YouTube for a wider audience of lurkers and curators to enjoy. With clear signage to that effect, of course.

So that’s some perspective on experiences that already exist in museums. What about new experiences, intended to be 2.0ish, that are starting to be designed now? Here are some considerations to satisfy these different kinds of visitors:

THE CONTRIBUTOR:

• If the interaction has a performance component, make that clear and reward the active participant with a small slice of fame.
• If the interaction involves an opinion or a person-specific reaction, show the contributor how their input relates to the larger network of previous contributors.
• Allow the contributor to develop a personal profile/site/collection of data based on their interactions throughout the museum. Network these profiles at the contributor’s discretion (note: doesn’t have to be totally public… think about how cool it could be if these sites were only networked within a small community, like your class or your family).

THE JUDGE:

• Wherever comfortable, give people a way to judge and classify content. This can be physical in the museum, or virtual on the web. They can take the form of ratings, tags, or comments.
• When someone judges something, connect them to other users who have made similar (or dissimilar) judgments/comments.
• Make the judgments count. Use them to prioritize content for lurkers and other judges. At best, let the judgments drive content presentation--let the users curate.
  

THE LURKER:

• Make the content easy to access from multiple entry points (in-person, on video, web, books).
• Make the content easy to navigate, and incorporate “frictionless serendipity” (thanks, Seb!) by using automatic tracking to make educated guesses about what the lurker is searching for.
• Update the content frequently and provide multiple forms of announcement about those changes.

The point here is to develop museum experiences that are available to all of these kinds of users at the same time. We’re all each of these kinds of users at different times of the day or points in our museum experience. I’d love to climb the rock wall but I’d prefer to just watch you throw the baseball. You’d love to give that painting a piece of your mind but will peacefully listen to that installation. So let’s give users an opportunity to do, an opportunity to comment, and an opportunity to watch.

1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum

The conventional wisdom on museum memberships is that they are "one size fits many" programs whose primary benefits are free entrance to the museum and insider access to exhibition openings. The main audiences for memberships are value members, who think of it as a good deal, lifelong learners, who want to come to as many programs and exhibits as possible, and donors, who support the museum. But what about all the other people who love your museum? What about the families who show up on your free days religiously or the ones blogging about your new artifacts? Could you create a membership that speaks specifically to them?

This week, an interview with Brooklyn Museum 1stfans managers Will Cary (membership) and Shelley Bernstein (technology) and artist An Xiao. 1stfans is a new kind of membership launched on January 3, 2009 that combines in-person meetups, private groups on Facebook and Flickr, and a private Twitter feed featuring work by original artists (for more background, check out Will and Shelley's blog posts and videos). It has gotten a lot of attention as a "social media membership," but Will and Shelley are adamant that 1stfans is not about social media. Instead, 1stfans is an attempt to turn the impersonal engine of museum membership into a relationship-based, community-centered interaction for two specific museum audiences.

1stfans builds benefits onto two programs that were already successful at connecting people to the Brooklyn Museum: free Target First Saturdays and online social media outreach. The people who engage in these programs already have pre-existing positive relationships with the institution, but they don't buy memberships. 1stfans is an attempt to change that by providing specific benefits targeted to those audiences' needs. Cynics say they are monetizing free programs; supporters say they are providing something worth paying for to a self-selected group for whom traditional membership is not appealing. Both are true. 1stfans is one answer to a universal question: "How do we create a membership to serve visitors who already have a positive relationship with the museum but have not chosen to purchase traditional memberships?"

Want to know how the Brooklyn Museum is answering this question? Then read on, and please share your thoughts in the comments.

Can you tell me about the basic concept behind 1stfans as a membership program?

Will: The big change we’ve made is taking something that is all marketing (membership) and turned it into something that is about personal interactions and growing the community. We’ve gone from a one-directional membership experience—we send you stuff again and again, and then you show up--to a triangular relationship where Shelley and I get to know the 1stfans, they get to know us, and they get to know each other. We announced 1stfans on December 5, 2008, and since then have had 272 1stfans from 15 states and 9 countries on 4 continents.

There are both virtual-only and local 1stfan members. What's the balance between them, and how do you do this triangulation with both kinds?

Will: Only 32 of the 272 so far are from outside the tri-state area, so the majority are locals. There are different benefits to 1stfans for different people. For the faraway folks, some of it is having personal access to staff at a museum you can't visit. For the locals, the meetups are happening at First Saturday--an event they were already going to. For example, on February 7, we had a free 1stfans behind-the-scenes event with conservator Lisa Bruno talking about animal mummies. We'd been twittering publicly about mummies all week, but the event on Saturday was restricted to 1stfans. 32 people showed up, and they liked the program, but the cool part was that everyone stayed around and talked to each other afterwards. And we definitely see people coming to the meetups and then following up online.

Shelley: For the faraway members, we don't have the meetups. But this week we posted a video of Lisa’s presentation on the 1stfans private Facebook group and she'll be available for Q&A on Facebook. We're curious to see how that goes.

Who are the 1stfans? Do you have a sense of why they are joining?

Will: This whole thing started with us discussing two audience segments: people who come to First Saturdays and people who connect with us on the Web—neither of whom buy memberships. And while there are some museum professionals and social media people joining out of curiosity, the majority are locals. We have all these local Brooklyn people who love the museum and come on First Saturdays and spend all day on Facebook and Flickr. This was made for them.

So you weren't targeting "Brooklyn artists" or some other demographic group. It's specific to people who come to the museum but aren't members.

Will: Right. This is part of an analytical process and drew on membership surveys we've done over several years. The challenges were there and we tried to find a solution. 1stfans was not an “if we build it, they will come” kind of project. They were already involved--we just needed to provide them with the right benefits. People shouldn’t get hung up on the social media-ness. Everyone gets fixated on this, but we’re just using it to address a problem.

Shelley: This is not about social media. Yes, we are using social media, but that's because we've always been using social media--this is an outgrowth of the relationships we already had on Flickr and Twitter, our attempt to provide additional benefits to those people.

How did you pick the price point of $20?

Will: It just felt right. As Shelley said, “everyone’s got a $20 in their pocket.” It's within the "impulse buy" range.

Shelley: At this price, people really use it a la carte. Some people want the in-person events, some people want to connect on social networks, and some 1stfans do both. Looking at the statistics on the online participation, each platform has a different number of group members, which means people are taking what they want from it.

How is 1stfans messaged relative to other membership types? Is it an add-on? Can I buy a 1stfans membership at the front desk?

Will: 1stfans is its own tier of membership and regular members can purchase it as an add-on. Since it is so wildly different from other museum memberships, we feel like we have to separate and distinguish it. We don't want people to say, "I'll just buy the cheapest membership" and become 1stfans without realizing what they are getting.

1stfans is not on our printed membership brochure because we don't want to confuse people. We advertise it at First Saturday and on the website, beacuse those are the places where our target audience come and those are the people who will like 1stfans.

Are 1stfans confused or upset that they don’t get free admission to the museum?

Will: We've only had one person ask about this, and no one has complained. Remember, these are people who come to First Saturday--which is already free--and they're at work when we’re open during the week. So free admission isn't the benefit they really need.

It's interesting that the focus for 1stfans is on these very specific audience segments. Could you imagine creating another targeted membership for, say, senior citizens who want to come in the morning on weekdays?

Shelley: It's funny you bring that up. When we first shared this idea, Will’s boss said, "this is a great and innovative project, but it only serves one part of the community. And we serve many--we have to serve our whole community."

Will: We're hopeful that 1stfans is just the first step in this direction. We’ve talked in marketing meetings about creating a package appealing to senior citizens just as we have for the 1stfans.

How do you balance the exclusive content with public content? Are there staff members pushing you to make these events available to 1stfans for free and charge the general public to come?

Shelley: That hasn't really come up with staff, but we do want to find more ways to share the content created for 1stfans with the public. For example, our 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is currently featuring Mary Temple, who is making this really great calendar of portraits of people in the news. In March, we will print a physical version of her work and display it publicly at First Saturday. She’ll do two talks about the project—one just for 1stfans and one that’s public and open to all. That’s also one of the reasons we made the video with An about her Morse code Twitter stream in January—so anyone who’s curious can get an idea of what this is about.

There's been a lot of debate in the social media world about the exclusive content, especially the Twitter Art Feed, people saying that we are selling something that should be free. You can read our thoughts (and lots of good comments from detractors and 1stfans alike) on this controversy here and here.

The Twitter Art Feed features a new artist every month. How are you selecting and rewarding these artists?

Shelley: Long-term, we're working with our John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Eugenie Tsai, to bring a mix of artists and ideas to the feed. Some artists are selected from the open call (including our first artist, An Xiao), others are projects or artists that we know of and think will work well in the feed for one reason or another, and some artists have work in our collection or are featured in our current exhibitions. Since 1stfans is a new program at the museum and one with an incredibly low price point, all artists in the Twitter Art Feed are donating their time and their effort, which is pretty amazing. One of the most exciting things for me personally is to see artists really fired up about the idea of this membership, wanting to support the Museum and willing to donate their energy to do so.

An, what was your experience like as the first artist to be featured on the Twitter Art Feed?

An: I'd been actively exploring online media and our emerging culture of branded, digital selves, with self-portrait series centered around blogging and advertising, and Twitter quickly became part of that larger exploration. I'd been using it for a while before I was selected for the January feed, but never as an art project per se--my account is a personal scrapbook of ideas and thoughts rather than what I might consider an artistic medium. So on the one hand, engaging in the 1stfans feeds was an exciting opportunity to take a new communications medium and use it as an artistic medium. On the other hand, it was intimidating for that very same reason!

Two things about the overall experience stood out. The first was the amount of work entailed. As a haiku poet and Zen artist, I've been trained in the power of brevity. The trick with the project was that, on top of the 140-character limit, each character in alaphanumerics could convert into as many as six dots and/or dashes in Morse code, thus dropping the amount of text I could squeeze into each tweet. I took time at the start of each week to prepare my tweets both to fit the character restrictions and to make them as interesting as possible.

Secondly, I loved how much 1stfans members got into it. I doubt many of us have ever sent a telegram or seen a telegraph machine, but I found myself having a number of witty, clever exchanges with folks, all in the long tradition of this archaic medium. Artist Nina Meledandri even used a combination of visual imagery and Morse code, taking the project outside Twitter and into Flickr, with a final response composed of pencils, crayons and pastels to represent dashes, and shells and stones to represent dots. The project received some criticism for being inaccessible and cumbersome (members had to copy and paste the tweets into a Morse code translator), but for the most part, the response was quite positive, and the feed became highly interactive. In that sense, the project evolved from simply a conceptual one at the outset into one that was performative and collaborative--an Internet theatre of sorts.

How did working on the Feed impact your relationship with the Brooklyn Museum?

I'd been a fan of the museum in general since I started dropping by a few years ago, and I particularly loved the sense of community around First Saturdays. However, it wasn't until I submitted a photo for Click!, a crowd-curated exhibition that Shelley organized, that I started to feel like a part of the museum. Shelley's warmth and enthusiasm stood out over email and even more so in person, and I soon found myself actively reading and occasionally participating in the blogs.

And so, well before 1stfans was developed, I already felt not simply like a visitor but both a member of a community and an active participant in their arts programming and discourse. Working on the Feed was simply a continuation of this experience. Shelley and Will were super helpful while I was in Los Angeles for the set-up, and of course, I was thrilled to tweet back and forth with 1stfans members and then to meet them in person and on Facebook. The fact that artists are willing to donate their time, effort and money to 1stfans is a real testament to the sense of community that the museum has created. In a city like New York, and in the often disparate and overwhelming art world, it's quite striking. Everything from the fact that Shelley and Will and other memberships staffers take the time to get to know members to the open online communities they've created to encourage interaction speaks to this.

Will and Shelley, have you hit any challenges or surprises thus far with 1stfans?

Shelley: The signup process is manual which is both good (we get to know people) and bad (time consuming). We couldn't use our exisiting setup to process these memberships, so we had to rethink it by using Google Checkout for payment and Google Docs to keep track of folks.

Will: The main challenge on a day-to-day basis concerns the nature of the internet: it doesn't stop when we leave the office. When 1stfans join on a Saturday, they expect to hear from us by Sunday. If they join at 8pm on a weeknight, they'll request to follow the Twitter Art Feed at 9pm, and send us an email at 10pm if that hasn't happened. Because 1stfans request to hear from us on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, we have to manually add them to the group, which sometimes involves finding their profiles on each of those sites. In order to serve 1stfans, Shelley and I have to find time to interact with them in a way that meets their demands while not taking away from the other work we have to do. It's tough, but because there's two of us we've made it work so far.

Is there a marketing strategy for 1stfans?

Will: No. We feel like we have to do an adequate job addressing our two target segments--then we’ll come up with ways to market this to other groups. We have 10,000 people at First Saturday – we want to hit more of them before we look for other segments to address. The 1stfans themselves are our greatest ambassadors helping spread the word through their own networks. The artists on the Twitter Art Feed are also doing a lot of promotion to their own networks-An was great, frequently posting about it on her blog.

What are the plans for the future of 1stfans?

Shelley: Our basic motto is be fully committed to our members, but keep finding small things that can make a big impact. Think outside the box to figure out how to involve both sets of people (faraway and local 1stfans) in one swoop, so we can be cautious of staff time and maximize effort. So, looking at February, we taped Lisa Bruno's in-person presentation on the animal mummies and put up the rough cut, then host a Q&A in the Facebook group for a few days and see how it goes. I'd say, generally, you'll find us doing things in a scrappy way figuring it's better to share as much as we can even if we can't make it pretty. Also, we don't know yet which formats work better than others, so there's going to be a lot of experimentation to find out.

Since this membership is based in the social networks, we are going to be watching carefully as that landscape changes (and it will). I think of this is a living membership structure in this way - we watch and we adapt. After all, Twitter may not be here forever, so we've got to keep thinking, adjust as necessary and grow with the technology in the same way we grow and learn with the group. The really wonderful thing is we are getting to know the people who have joined, so when the time comes to make adjustments, I'm confident that this will be a discussion rather than a top-down mandate from the sky.

Floor Staff Hit the Blogosphere: Exploratorium Explainers

One of the most popular posts on Museum 2.0 is about different kinds of institutional blogs. The fourth kind I talked about is the "personal voice blog," in which museum staff write honestly and openly about their institution and experiences. At the time, I referenced a blog from the top: the Walters Art Museum Director's blog. Gary Vikan has done a great job writing passionately (and reasonably frequently) about his observations on the museum and art world. If you are a management person, you're probably thinking he's incredibly brave for doing so. If you're lower on the totem pole, you might think it's easy for him to write what he wants--he's the Director. Presumably of all staff, he's the one in the best position to know what's appropriate, and to push that boundary when he thinks it's reasonable to do so.

I recently discovered another fabulous "personal voice blog" of quite a different nature. It's the Exploratorium Explainers' blog. Unlike Gary Vikan's individual blog, this one is written by a group of staff. Floor staff. Their topics range from exhibits they have crushes on to boring events they work to funny interactions with visitors on the floor. They post frequently, include lovely photos and slideshows, and generally do a wonderful job communicating their energy and love of the museum through their writing.

Check it out. And then, ask yourself, would my institution support a blog like this? The messaging is all museum- and science-positive, but the tone is irreverent. Some examples:

(on the "Mr. Fish" exhibit)
Ok, I’ll admit it. I was wrong. I used to doubt the exhibit “Talk to a Fish”. I thought it was super-lame- one of the lamest exhibits on the floor.

(on an evening event)
Kristin won the wittiest comment of the night award for telling me, as I bumped into the pictured summer camp poster, spilling water all over the floor in the process…”It’s a sign” Buh Duh Chchch

(on a DNA training session)
Eventually, Ryan found his groove with a style meshing the down-to-earth flavor of Fred Flintstone with the joie de vivre of Richard Simmons:

Maybe you're smiling. Maybe you're cringing. Maybe you're doing both at the same time and your face looks a little bizarre. But what's the source of fear about this kind of blog? This is a blog that empowers staff and communicates museum mission. I think the most commendable aspect of the blog is how balanced it is in tone--I never get the feeling that someone is going to go "over the top." But what if they do? Is there a marketing person with his finger on the trigger, ready to shut down an unacceptable post? Probably (I hope) not.

Personal voice blogs are the stickiest type for established institutions. There's potential for content that is deemed inappropriate, proprietary, or off-message to get out there, and since the point is to present a unique individual voice, it's hard to justify or even implement monitoring/censoring effectively.

But this is the other side of radical trust. It's not just about trusting our visitors and their contributions. It's also about trusting our own staff and colleagues to act responsibly when given an opportunity to join the museum mouthpiece. And not just the directors. Ironically, floor staff may be the MOST appropriate museum bloggers. They are the voice and face of the museum to visitors on a daily basis. They have the most connection with visitors' interests and therefore potentially the most relevant content to share with readers.

Encouraging staff, especially junior staff, to blog on behalf of the institution is a win-win for the staff and the museum. Giving staff a venue for their thoughts creates a high (museum-level) expectation quality-wise. If staff maintain personal blogs, who knows how kindly or unkindly they will reference their workplace. But if they are blogging under the masthead of the institution, they go from being freelancers to staff reporters. They want to further the institution. They want to know it's okay to do so without fear of being shut down or fired.

Some companies walk this line by offering their staff individual blog space (in which they can write about pretty much whatever they want) and then maintaining an aggregate, more publicized blog that pulls appropriate posts from the personal ones. Others start with internal blogs, keep those going until management feels comfortable, and then go public. And others set basic guidelines and then step away.

I'd love to see more floor staff blogs (and security blogs, and exhibit maintenance blogs, and...). These people are often the least empowered staff authority-wise. Supporting staff blogging is a great way to acknowledge the extent to which they are the ones who make memorable visitors experiences. And the Explainers' blog showcases a group of people who are dedicated to their institution and grateful for the opportunity to be one of its mouthpieces. I can only imagine that the blog is improving staff retention.

Not convinced? I'll leave the final word to the Explainers:

Finally, I want to say how proud it made me feel that the explainers, on our own, had continued the spirit of innovation that defines the special place we work at.

Good for them.

Intranets, Yammer, and Other Web 2.0 Tools for Staff Communication

What's the most immediately useful application of Web 2.0 tools to your museum? It probably isn't new forms of visitor engagement (no matter how much I write about those relationships). So many museums suffer from departmental siloing, deluges of all-staff emails, the painful jujitsu required to collate seven versions of the same document... the list goes on. And while defining new relationships with visitors may be a complex institutional process requiring buy-in on many levels, there's no reason not to move quickly and confidently to improve the ways that staff communicate inside your institution.

Here are seven frequent staff communication problems, and tools to address them. They all involve tearing down silos, removing gatekeepers, and making it easy to get the information you want when you want it. Oh, and they're mostly all free.

1. Is your staff directory perpetually out-of-date?

Create a shared Google spreadsheet that lives on the Web and can be updated by everyone. This way, each new staff person can enter her own name, email, phone, etc., and change things as needed. You can even create a handy form to send out so people don't have to edit the spreadsheet itself. The document will always available in its most recent version on the Web, and you can easily add new fields as needed by your institution. Here's an example that took me 3 minutes to create: fill out this form to be added to our imaginary directory!

2. Do you have no idea what's going on beyond your department or team except when an annoying all-staff email announces locker cleanup this Friday?

Set up Yammer to host an internal, private free Twitter feed for your institution. Yammer works like Twitter--people send out short messages that anyone can read or follow. You can receive the messages on the Web, on your desktop, on your phone, or in an instant messaging client. The difference is that all of the messages are internal to your institution. This means a quick way to:

• let staff know about fundraising successes
• share funny visitor stories from the floor
• make staff aware of a big group, program, or event in the museum
  
• tell people there are cupcakes in the break room
• update folks on new media hits
  
• let staff know that an important donor is coming into the offices
  

Right now, most museums share this information via all-staff emails (or not at all when it comes to the quick stories that give the pulse of the institution). By using a service like Yammer, people don't have to read and delete emails clogging their inbox--they can let the messages they don't care about go by, and hone in on the ones that really interest them.

You don't need everyone to sign up to start using Yammer--you can start with a small team or a few interested staff members. The more people use it, the more diversity of information from across the institution you'll start sharing on a daily basis. Not only can it reduce the all-staff email frustration, it can give you a pulse on what's happening in every area of your institution.

3. Do you need a way to report, document, and share day-to-day information on a project or within your department?

Many museum teams don't see each other in person every day. This is true for operations teams, which often include part-time staff who don't intersect, as well as for development teams, which often involve outside contractors or remote staff. Some operations teams use a log book to keep staff updated on the activities of the previous day, but too many rely on word-of-mouth and lose the opportunity to document institutional history and convey knowledge from staff member to staff member.

Internal team blogs can ameliorate these gaps in interaction by providing a group-authored space where staff can share everything from daily log reports to research thoughts. You can set up a free blog via Blogger (my preferred platform) and set it to private, identifying a key set of people who are allowed to author and read posts. You will effectively have a departmental journal of work going on, discoveries made, major events that deserve to be discussed and memorialized. And since people can subscribe to blogs via RSS, staff can select the departments they want to follow "on-demand" without getting bogged down by lots of all-staff emails.

4. Do you need a way to do research and brainstorm collaboratively with your team?

Whereas blogs are a good reporting mechanism, wikis are a better collaborative tool. An internal, shared group wiki will allow you to explore different topics (i.e. create new pages for new areas of interest), refine mission statements, and aggregate research resources in a central area. I like Wik.is as a free, no-ad, easy to use tool, and have been using it with many clients to keep notes from meetings, organize information, and share resources. Most wiki systems also allow you to easily attach documents. A good wiki can easily become the homebase for creative group work.

5. Do you need a way to share links, images, and videos besides emailing them around?

You can create lists of links on wikis and blogs, but there are also tools that allow you to connect directly to other staff members while you are in the process of discovering and bookmarking items across the Web. Delicious is an online bookmarking system that makes it easy for you to "tag" websites of interest and save them on a single webpage. By sharing your bookmarks with other staff members, you can create targeted link lists for a variety of projects. For example, here's my Delicious page. You can see my network--the people who I'm connected with. We can surf each others' bookmarks, and if we choose a shared tag for a project, then anyone can search Delicious for that tag and see all bookmarks related to that project.

You can do similar things on Flickr and YouTube to share images and videos of interest. I "friend" people I'm working with, and our cumulative "favorites" on these sites become useful resources for image and video reference.

6. Do you need a way to author and revise documents with others?

Many people use Google Docs for this, though I find the interface a bit confusing. I prefer to use wikis to create group-authored documents. All of the text is available directly on the wiki page (no attachments to save or links to click on), easy to edit, and every revision is automatically saved. You can even subscribe to the recent changes and get them sent directly to your email inbox or to a feed reader like Google Reader. Here's a sample document that you can add to and change to get the feel for wiki editing, this time using a wiki service called WetPaint. (I chose WetPaint instead of my favorite wiki provider, Wik.is, because WetPaint allows non-registered users to edit pages.)

7. Do you need a way to put all of these activities in one place?

You may look at all of the above suggestions and think, "Oy. She wants me to sign up for blogs, wikis, yammer... this is way too many different tools to learn! How will I keep track of them all?"

There are two ways to organize all these kinds of Web 2.0 communication: you can do it for free by creating a custom homepage, or you can pay someone else to aggregate it in something like an intranet.

First, two ways to do it yourself:

1. For all staff: create a wiki that just features links to each of the different services you are using. You can easily edit it to add new blogs, shared documents, or other wikis that different teams are using. The wiki becomes both a record of all internal social media work and an easy place from which to access it. If you are really tech-competent, you can download the open-source version of Mindtouch (makers of wik.is) to create your own custom community site.
   
2. For yourself: create a Google homepage that has individual links to the different wikis and shared documents in use. You can embed a Google Reader into your homepage and enter all of the addresses for blogs and wiki updates into that reader to create an aggregate feed of posts and changes across all your internal sites.

Paying someone else to create an intranet--a webspace that provides all of the functions listed above (directory, wikis, blogs, updates)--can be very useful IF you are ready to make these new communication systems institution-wide requirements. Web 2.0-enabled intranets are fabulous because they don't require an administrative gate-keeper, but if no one uses them, they're not worth the money. If you're not sure you need an intranet, I recommend starting with some experimental, small projects and see how things go. If you get critical mass and want a more integrated system, you can spring for the intranet.

Here are three robust intranet solutions to consider:

1. ThoughtFarmer. This is my favorite "wiki-inspired" intranet solution, which provides dynamic, integrated staff directory, departmental wikis, and individual blogs, all connected in an attractive and simple to use interface. ThoughtFarmer costs $109/user (20% discount for non-profits, about $5000/year for updates) and requires a minimum of 100 users. ThoughtFarmer is the best option if you are a large institution with an interest in collaborative documentation, creative work, and messaging.
2. SocialText, like ThoughtFarmer, is a wiki-based collaborative internal workspace. The pricing is comparable ($5000 minimum startup), though there is a small business version for $10/user/month. SocialText is more customizable than ThoughtFarmer but lacks some of the more attractive user interface elements of ThoughtFarmer. SocialText is best for highly tech-literate folks who want to customize their own experience.
   
3. Google Apps. Google Apps provides more standard enterprise needs, like email, calendar, and instant messaging, and fewer Web 2.0 applications (Google Docs and Google sites). This is a good solution if you are looking for a new email and calendar server, but may not be perfect if you really want dynamic shared spaces.While you can use Google Apps for free, to have a version with no ads and good backup systems you'll pay $50 per user per year.
   

Remember, you don't have to do all of this at once. But if even just one of these seven problems is something that has you banging your head against the ticket counter every day, consider trying one of these suggestions. It will change your workflow--reducing your reliance on email, allowing you to get and receive on-demand information--and it will require you to be more proactive about "following" activities across the institution. The benefit is more flexible, varied content from across the museum, and smarter collaboration with team members. Fewer headaches guaranteed.

What tools do you use to make your collaborative work easier?

PostSecret: Lessons in Meaningful User-Generated Content

Recently, I’ve become a little disheartened by the extent to which the web has dominated my—and others’—thinking about ways that museums can integrate 2.0 into their offerings. But today I had an experience that reinvigorated my love for and belief in tangible projects that can fill museums with content that is user-generated, shared, and explored. I heard Frank Warren speak at the American Visionary Art Museum. Frank Warren has been called “the most trusted stranger in America.” In 2004, for DC’s Art-o-Matic community show, he initiated an experiment called PostSecret. He handed out 3000 self-addressed postcards to strangers that were blank on the front. On the back, they said,

You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything - as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.

Create your own 4-by-6-inch postcards out of any mailable material. But please only put one secret on a card. If you want to share two or more secrets, use multiple postcards. (Please do not e-mail your secret.)

Please put your complete secret and image on one side of the postcard.

Tips:

• Be brief - the fewer words used the better.
• Be legible - use big, clear and bold lettering.
• Be creative - let the postcard be your canvas.

Within five weeks, he had 100 postcards on display at Art-o-Matic. The cards were funny, heartwrenching, thoughtful, and beautiful. At the end of the show, he packed up and thought the secrets were over. But they had just begun.

Now, two years later, Frank has received over 100,000 postcards. He publishes 20 each Sunday on a website that gets 1 million hits per week. He has published three books of cards (500,000 copies), has two more in the works, and has put on numerous gallery and museum shows of the postcards. Today at the AVAM, there were at least 300 people in the crowd to see (and handle!) the cards, get books signed, and share their passion for this project. Frank was a wonderful speaker. I was so impressed by his humility and his love and respect for the people who send him cards. But the truly awesome thing about PostSecret is what a great community project it is. As the AVAM staff member who introduced Frank said, “We can all be a part of PostSecret… it may even include the work of people in this room, which is part of what makes this so exciting.” And indeed, when solicited, about 20 people in the room raised their hands to say yes, they had sent in postcards.

What makes this such a great community art project?

PostSecret asks the right question.
Museum designers labor over how to stimulate and evoke response from visitors. The most basic, and perhaps least interesting, question that is asked of visitors is, “What do you think?” How would you answer such a question? Frank’s question, or his entreaty—“send me your secret,” is both tantalizing and comforting. He publishes his home address for you to send your longings, fears, and desires to. People appreciate that openness and vulnerability, and take the opportunity to respond in kind.

And the responses are beautiful, both in language and composition. As Frank put it, “their courage makes the art meaningful.” The contributors are writing about something deeply important to them. They care, and so they labor to create something of value. Random people may not be able to create great works of dispassionate art. But in this project, each artist is uniquely powerful because they give voice to something vital, something easy for viewers to access emotionally.

PostSecret has a great medium.
As Frank said, 4 by 6 inches is not enough space to explain an entire story. Because of that inherent insufficiency, contributors are compelled to use images, carefully select their words, and the result is something evocative that is open to interpretation. When you read a card that says, “I’m still in love with who you used to be,” where does your mind go? There’s a rich inner story behind each of the cards, and it’s within all of our grasp to imagine it.

Also, the act of mailing something, of creating a physical thing and sending it off adds a tangible, potentially ritualistic element to “setting free” a secret. Frank told stories of postcards that came with $10 in postage, as if the author was concerned the card might somehow get returned to them. He also read emails from people who wrote cards, but then ended up giving them to others—family members, boyfriends, friends—instead of mailing them to him.

PostSecret fosters an engaged, caring community out of anonymity.
It’s extremely likely that individuals use the experience of writing a postcard to PostSecret as the stepping stone to sharing those secrets with loved ones. But perhaps more extraordinary is the extent to which PostSecret brings together strangers in support of one another. Each time Frank publishes a card that expresses insecurity or fear, dozens of caring emails come in. A boy sends a postcard with a photo of his blemished chest and asks, “who will ever love me?” The emails pour in: “I will. What’s inside counts.” In the Art-o-Matic show, one postcard read, “I’m a white guy who likes black girls.” During the show, Frank found that someone had written on this card. The stranger wrote, “That’s ok.” I heard so many stories of affirmation and caring today I felt like I was at a freaking Hallmark convention. But the stories were real, they represented interactions between stranger, and they were deeply affecting.

PostSecret motivates people to start their own communities and rituals for secret sharing.
There are PostSecret spin-off sites. There are also people getting active in their own communities in suicide hotlines and traditional support lines. And then there are the unusual stories. One woman wrote her secret on a post-it and stuck it on the bathroom mirror in her large office complex. Later that day, she returned to find 12 other post-its with secrets surrounding hers. A girl whose postcard about anorexia was not published on the website made a shirt that said, “20% of anorexics die. Here are the symptoms of anorexia…” and wore it to school to spread her message. Classmates and teachers asked her to make t-shirts for them to wear, too. PostSecret has a ripple effect that not only engages people in that project; it engages them in the idea of sharing with others in all kinds of ways.

PostSecret feels personal and immediate, as well as universal.
Frank said that each time he gets a postcard in the mail, he feels like he is holding “a living secret being experienced in real-time." There’s an urgency to the secrets—even ones that have been hidden for tens of years—because the postcard represents the moment at which it was finally let out. Each week, the website offers new secrets, and the old ones, stored in Frank's basement, disappear.

Frank commented that he thinks we love these cards not because we’re voyeurs, but because they reveal “the essence of humanity.” I’m not sure if that’s true, but there are certainly hundreds of postcards that resonate with me personally—and I imagine with everyone who views them. Across age, gender, continent, language, the PostSecret viewers see the same desires and troubles. There were many stories of personal action taken after reading others’ cards, and appreciation for no longer feeling alone in a secret or a feeling.

PostSecret is curated.
Not every postcard makes the website; these days, Frank receives 1000 per week and publishes about 20. He says that he looks for cards that are authentic, that tell a story that feels powerful and hasn’t been shared before. Each week, he tries to create a narrative tableau of secrets to publish, looking for a hopeful one, a funny one, a confused one. By culling down the submissions for presentation, Frank is reinforcing the values that motivated PostSecret in the first place—people sharing honest, creative expressions of their secrets. It keeps the project focused.

I felt mixed about this curated component originally. Enough people are looking at the website—why doesn’t he post them all and let people vote, like YouTube? Curating the cards probably helps keep exhibitionism and showboating at bay. It’s not about how many cards you create or how fabulist the tale you tell. It’s about how honest and real one person thinks they are. And the fact that the cards are only available for one week at a time--as an art piece, it evokes the immediacy of a secret, but as a new viewer I want access to all the content.

And this is where museums (could) step in. In the ideal world, Frank’s basement—where he sorts and selects all the cards—becomes an open collection storage facility at a museum. Volunteers can come and help sort and scan the cards. Different people could curate—not just one person—and everyone would have access to the core data. The project is active, continuing, bringing new content to the museum each week and motivating people to return and get involved. PostSecret is self-help through art, through community. It opens people to each other and to themselves. It pulls in creative expression from all kinds of people all over the world. It has web components, but is essentially about physical objects.

PostSecret is a model for where museums can go with 2.0.

It doesn’t have to be postcards. It doesn’t have to be about secrets. What are the deep questions museums can ask to get people motivated to contribute, to listen, and to care?

An Open Letter to Museums on Twitter

Note: this is a geeky post that assumes familiarity with Twitter. If you are new to Twitter, please check out this post for more context.

Dear Museums on Twitter,

Thanks for experimenting in a new and largely uncharted online environment. It's not easy, and many of you are taking innovative, exciting approaches to it. But not enough of you. Only 80% of Twitter success is showing up, and I've been frustrated by the lack of creativity applied to the other 20%. So here is a list of suggestions that hopefully will improve the way your museum thinks about using Twitter.

1. Don't use Twitter to spam me about visiting. It's warm out so I should go to the zoo? Or it's rainy so you suggest I visit the museum? You are belittling my ability to plan my day without your helpful reminder about the weather and your institution's existence. If a company did this, suggesting that I come to Starbucks or REI every moment of the day, I (and hopefully you) would see it as a spammy intrusion. And do you really think there are people out there, sitting at home with nothing to do, waiting for Twitter to tell them where to go next? If such people exist, they are probably ZOMBIES and are not good for business.

2. It's okay if you start by just following. Twitter is like a big radio party--everyone can broadcast and everyone can listen. If radio was a brand new media format and you had the opportunity to host a show or run a station, you'd probably listen to some other stations before deciding whether and what to broadcast. Following is like listening. Listening is a good thing.

3. Once you decide to tweet, make it interesting. When someone follows me, I go to their page and look at the most recent tweets. I scan through about ten and ask myself: is this content interesting enough for me to follow this person? My standards are pretty low. If there is one link, one phrase, one idea that piques my interest, I follow that person. Think about your followers. The majority are probably coming because they have prior interest in your institution. But you have the potential to reach a whole new world of followers--their friends--if your content is witty, useful, or appealing to those who have never visited your museum. Take a scan at your most recent tweets page. Does it look spammy and dull, or does it look interesting?

4. Tell me something I can't find on your homepage. I'm cool with you using Twitter to let me know about new blog posts, exhibits, programs, or changes to your hours. But if you ONLY use Twitter to do those things, you are just using it as a feeder to the other web content you already produce. You could do better. Give me a little bit of behind-the-scenes insight, like the Palmer Museum twitterer who bragged about helping a registrar move a 700 pound box or the Whitney Museum which trumpeted its "very nice" toilet rating. Give me a game, like the Smithsonian's name that artifact gambit. Give me links to relevant content from elsewhere on the web like the Walker Art Center does. Or just draw me into things I might not discover on my own, like the Getty's elegant quotations about pieces from their collection or the Exploratorium's online interactives.

5. Tell me who you are. It's always a bit strange to see institutions on Twitter, when, hopefully, the accounts are controlled by humans. I love the way that the Heard Museum bio addresses this strangeness, explaining that "I am a museum, or rather someone [ @katecrowley ] who works here, pretending to be the building. I am a museum of Native Cultures and Art!" Jeffrey at the Mattress Factory also does a great job of this. If you're interested in this topic, check out this experiment to root out the people behind big companies on Twitter, which recently included this comment about museums: "When museums tweet to each other in first person, I question why the museums don't include the names of the people tweeting."

6. Respond to people. Make the @ your friend. When I look at the Brooklyn Museum's Twitter page, I see lots of replies to different people across the platform and I think, "this is an institution that is engaged with the community." Same goes for the San Francisco Zoo, which often tweets out visitors' cute photos taken at the zoo. These institutions are showing their appreciation for and interest in other people's comments and discussions. It may sound like work to reply to others, but it can be easier than generating your own content. If you start on Twitter as a follower, eventually you'll see a tweet that you want to respond to... and the conversation begins.

7. Give me content worthy of your institution. I can't tell you what to tweet about. I don't feel, as Tyler Green does, that an art museum MUST tweet about art. But you should tweet in a style and with content that is of a quality consistent with your institution. Remember the radio station analogy. If your museum was hosting a radio show, would you only talk about the open hours and try to entice people to show up? Of course not. You would do something engaging, educational, entertaining, provocative... all the elements that you try to design into every program or exhibit.

So now imagine you have a text-based, short-format radio show. What would fit there? The Brooklyn Museum has an open call for artists who want to use Twitter to communicate with 1stfan members, but you don't need to be an artist to create quality content on Twitter.

Here are some museum Twitter "radio stations" I'd love to follow:

• Funny things said by visitors.
  
• Guard feed! (Thanks for the idea, Shelley.)
  
• Institutional superstitions or weird things about the building.
• The imagined experiences of a famous artifact, heavily loved interactive, or other institutional mascot (see this Twitter feed, which I doubt is written by AMNH staff).
  
• Haiku about museum work.
• A daily or weekly feature on a specific topic.
  
• Jokes, recipes, quotes, and interesting facts. Do you know why there are naked ladies on the front of ships?
  
• Weird and surprising behind-the-scenes victories and challenges. What's it like to prep an exhibition on poop?
  
• Topical, provocative questions.

This is just a short list. So please, get together with the most creative (and concise) brains in your institution and find the idea that will work for you. Twitter may be simpler to produce content for than a blog or podcast (let alone an exhibit), but that's no excuse not to use it to reinforce your brand and your mission by creating top-notch tweets.

The good news is that no one is doing this wonderfully. So go out there and impress the whole world. Oh, and consider joining the museum Twitter group. I'll be following your progress!

Pranksters in the Museum

Two recent events have got me thinking about pranks and unauthorized activities in museums.

1. Improv Everywhere staged an event at the Metropolitan Museum in which an actor posing as King Philip IV of Spain signed autographs in front of his portrait, as painted by Diego Velazquez in the 1620s. After some silliness, engagement, and confusion, they were instructed to leave.
2. Two students, Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler, created an unauthorized ad campaign for the Smithsonian as part of a school project. These "historically hardcore" images attracted a lot of attention on the internet, and when Jenny contacted the Smithsonian about it, she was instructed to remove the Smithsonian logo.

In both cases, outsiders co-opted the museum for their own devices. These unauthorized projects were engaging and attractive. Neither harmed the museums in question, though they both had questionable qualities. The Improv Everywhere actors gleefully passed themselves off as authorities and told visitors that yes, this young man in front of them was in fact 400 years old. The students' ads made unauthorized use of the Smithsonian logo and could be argued to dilute or misrepresent the institutional brand.

So here's the question: what's the right response to this kind of activity? There are two knee-jerk camps--one that says this is all unacceptable and another that says museums should loosen up and embrace the deviance. I feel like it's more complicated than that.

When assessing these kinds of unauthorized activities, here are the three things I'd consider:

1. What's the quality of the project? Many of the people arguing for the fake Smithsonian ads mentioned how great they are, and that the museum should be pleased to thrilled to get such creative ad work for free. While the ads are indeed funny, engaging, and lovely, not every unauthorized use is. A museum would do better to evaluate this on a case-by-case basis--so the institution can say yes to the gems and no to the duds--rather than having an ironclad rule either way.
2. Is it a project that would be improved with institutional support? Watching the Improv Everywhere video, I'm struck by the fact that it is the deviant nature of the activity that makes it fun. You watch the action expecting to see the guards intervene, and they become part of the drama. I'm not sure the activity would be as surprising or engaging if it were sanctioned by the museum, and I certainly think it would be a bizarre use of staff time to conduct such an event. Mark Allen of Machine Project talks a lot about the benefits of artists creating "shadow organizations" within museums to comment on and respond to their peccadilloes. Without the formal institution, there can be no deviance. That said, there are some projects that are best conducted with institutional support--Machine Project typically works in this fashion. And some truly outsider projects, like the fabulous Vital 5 unauthorized podcast tour of the Portland Art Museum, create products that I'd love to see museums adopt and champion.
3. By shutting down the unauthorized project, are you working against your core values or mission? In many cases, the reasons these projects get rejected is to protect the institutional brand against interlopers. But brand is not as important as mission--and both contribute to public image. In the Improv Everywhere situation, I only see a loose connection between the Met's mission and the unauthorized activity insofar as the museum wants to engage people with the art. But the Smithsonian ads are a different story. The Smithsonian is a public institution that is actively seeking to make itself more open and pursuing a vision that positions the Smithsonian as belonging to everyone. By shutting down a high-quality deviance that was garnering enthusiasm for the institution, the Smithsonian may have done more harm to its image than good. Any organization's public image is shaped by lots of material and commentary in the marketplace--not just that institution's press releases and logo. It's worth remembering that when evaluating any given deviance.

What do you think about these kinds of pranks and unauthorized uses of the institution? How do you think museums should respond to or engage with the pranksters?